


Red String

by Kammy



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Soulmate AU, TG Lady Appreciation Week, Violence is also rather slight but I warned for it anyway, but not actually romance, pairings are pretty much one sided
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4784714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kammy/pseuds/Kammy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rize has a name written on her wrist, which means she’s supposed to fall in love with someone. She’s not sure what this means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red String

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Rize's day of TG Lady Appreciation week. Check out other works about her and other TG ladies at tgladyappreciationweek.tumblr.com, if you like!
> 
> I don't normally like soulmate AUs, but I wrote one anyway! I hope you enjoy it!

Rize had characters written on her wrist, lines as black as ink. She remembered the day they appeared, but only in the faint way one remembers a dream. In those days, she’d wandered from place to place, barefoot, shying from the light, a woman always pulling her tightly by the wrist.

_closer, closer, don’t wander off, don’t let them find you._

Her strongest impression was of the hunger. Burning, tearing hunger that never left, that made her curl up and dig her fingers into her sides. But she couldn’t eat, couldn’t hunt.  _They_ would find her, the woman said, if she hunted. So she had to swallow dry, rotting scraps: never enough, never enough.

And then there were the marks on her wrist. The woman explained them.

“It means there is someone out there for you,” she said, “Someone who will take care of you and be with you forever. That’s his name on your wrist. One day you’ll meet him, and you’ll know. Because that’s what you were born for.”

Rize was supposed to fall in love, the woman said. It was supposed to be wonderful. Love was the best thing in the world, the woman told her: it felt better than biting into the tastiest meat, or falling to sleep on a full stomach.

She couldn’t say when the woman left. She didn’t even remember or face, or her name. Rize didn’t think much about it, nursed no bruised, tender feelings over her loss. It once occurred to her when she’d reached her teens that the woman had likely been her mother, but the revelation was brief and she didn’t dwell much on it.

All that remained were the dark characters on her wrist, and the hunger.  _Eat, eat all you can,_ she learned.  _Tomorrow you might not have the chance._

* * *

 

The characters on her wrist were the first thing she learned to read. Her father taught her how to piece together the meaning of the lines. Or at least, she called him father. He had a name for the thing on her wrist:  _soul mark._ Everyone had one somewhere on their body, and it had the name of their soul-mate, the one they are destined to fall in love with.

“But why do they fall in love?” she asked.

Father took out an old book with the pages falling out, and read to her a story. The story told of a paradise where people were free from all strife, but they disobeyed the gods so as punishment they were split in two. Because of this, each person was really only half a person. In order to truly be complete, they had to find their other half: their soulmate.

“But that’s a silly story,” Rize said, “I’m not half a person. If I was only half a person I’d be dead.”

“When you meet your soulmate,” he told her, “You’ll feel like you’ve been dead all along, and that you didn’t become alive until you met them. It isn’t your body, but your soul that’s half of a whole person.”

Those were the days she listened to her father, so she shrugged and decided that she’d wait to see what it felt like to meet her soulmate. It should at least be interesting and possibly pleasant. Meanwhile, there were other things to concern herself with.

Her father was strict, but she didn’t mind. He taught her kanji to study difficult books of philosophy and she used them to read magazines and children’s books. That opened the door to the other realms of fiction, and soon she was reading book after book, savoring the ones that knew how to tear apart a character sensually, lingering over each detail and expression.

He gave her plain clothes and cut her hair, but her eyes started to turn to the pretty dresses and jewelry she’d see glimpses of in magazines. He’d tear apart her magazines and throw out any silky, glittering things she snatched and hoarded for herself. “Vanity,” he called it. Materialism that clouded the mind and provided nothing but distractions to throw one out of balance.

He talked a lot about balance, about ordering one’s own thoughts and spirit. She learned to tune out his lectures and think of soft human bodies and what kind of meals she wanted next. There was so much to try: young children with their round cheeks, muscled athletes, women with voluptuous curves... she thought about them late into the night, her mouth watering and her lips dry. Even if she wasn’t starving, she could swear she felt the shadow hunger pangs.

_more, more, never enough, never enough, juicy meat, too good to waste eat eat eat_

She snuck out one night to spite him, and ended up eating a man on the street before going to see her first film. It was a movie about soulmates, a man and a woman who found out they were destined for each other even though they hated each other. Then, they slowly fell in love and the woman gave up her career to be a housewife. Rize’s first thought was that the outfits the woman wore were  _delicious._ But then, there were  _things._ Things that were repeated from the fashion magazines, things that made her curl her lip in annoyance.

“It’s wrong to sleep with someone besides your soulmate. You need to save yourself for them.”

“You belong to your soulmate. You should want to change yourself for them.”

“If you don’t put your soulmate first, then you’re doing it wrong.”

Rize wondered at the audacity of it, expecting someone to do so much for someone else just because of a name written on their body. How ludicrous. And yet, her father shook his head stoically at her the moment she complained about it.

“It is fate,” he told her, “You can’t stop yourself from it. We all live according to the path that was set for us. The wise realize the path is for the best.”

She felt a faint buzz of annoyance. Then, an idea.

“Oh?” she asked, “So fate can stop me from doing whatever I want?”

He nodded. She wasn’t too mad, not really. The idea was rather a wild one for such a small thing, but the words telling her  _you can’t_ lit something inside her, something that reminded her of the thrill right before she bit out a live throat, or the rush she got when she leapt off a building. The challenge was too much.

“Really,” she said, “So then, does a soulmark grow back?”

Before he could answer, she lifted her wrist and pressed her lips against it for a moment. Then, she tore out the name there with her teeth.

Soulmarks, as it turned out, did not grow back.

* * *

 

Romance and love was a joke, she decided. It was one, big joke—one everyone in the world was in on except for her.

_I can’t live without love! If I never find my soulmate, I’ll die._

She heard people proclaiming that loudly from the corners of coffee shops, or on the street as girls leaned in close to each other. She could not take such sentiments seriously. Surely, she told herself, this was some form of sarcasm she was not yet attuned to. She couldn’t believe even  _humans_ could be that pathetic.

This was in the days after she’d taken down her father—a disappointingly easy task that left her strangely empty, and strangely relieved. In those days, she killed, ate, stole, and bought all the dresses and make-up she wanted. She didn’t know how to dress herself at first, or how to apply the stuff. She spent hours at it, trying one color and the next, finally marveling at the end results. Make-up was fun, along with all the other pretty things she was just allowing herself to get used to.

And then there was Banjou. Puppy-faced Banjou who talked big about soulmates—one of the many men who suddenly started popping up the moment she’d learned how to polish herself. Banjou looked at her half like she were some sort of goddess, and half like she were a wounded butterfly. Like she had been hurt somewhere and needed to be held. Her lips curled in automatic disgust at the sight of him.

For a moment, when she’d seen his face, she’d been taken ahold of by the strangest thought that it might be  _him._ But then she heard his name, and laughed.

It wasn’t  _him._

(But she still knew  _him_ , the name that she’d torn off herself years ago. That was not something she’d realized until that moment.)

Banjou wanted to know about her soulmark. She knew he was going to ask and when he finally did she grinned.

“I got rid of it,” she said lightly.

“You…?”

“It happened to get torn off.”

There it was, that  _look_ again. Like she hadn’t done it herself. Like she’d been doomed unfairly to some horrible fate. Like she was a child who needed to be coddled. She scraped her teeth together behind her lips.

“It’s okay, your soulmate never leaves you,” he told her, “Even if the mark is gone, fate—fate will bring you together. Because fate is written into your bloodstream and into the universe itself. Or, uh, that’s what my mother used to tell me.”

He had turned pink at the last admission, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. He flicked his eyes away from her for a moment.

“You really think so? How amusing,” she laughed. “I tore it off myself.”

(But she remembered the name, and felt her heart beat a little harder. Was he right?)

“Why would you do that?” he asked, something like horror or pity in his voice, “Did something happen? Are you afraid of having a soulmate…? I mean, not that it’s really any of my business, but sometimes I look at you and I think that...”

She tilted her head. Was she afraid? Had something happened to her to make her this way? She knew that’s what he was implying—insufferable dog that he was. Well, had she? He looked at her like there was something pitiably wrong. Like all the wrongness could be pinpointed to a single thread, and unraveled before her. Like she could be made better.

(But what was the “right” way to be? Like the women in the movies? Like the human women who cooed over children and took all their happiness from their mate?)

Her eyes narrowed at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, flushing a little as he tried to back off, “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m just… I find myself wondering about what you think. What you feel.”

Feelings were strange. She could never tell them apart, and didn’t care to. Everyone else—ghouls, humans—they seemed to be able to separate each feeling and point to it, saying, “This one is anger! This one is fear! And this one is love!” Perhaps if she looked deep inside herself she could say what she felt about it all. But she had no patience for such a game.

“It doesn’t matter to you,” she sang out, making a point of leaning in close to him and putting her hands on his chest, “It was never your name.”

He looked hurt; so, so hurt. Good. She pushed him away.

She wondered for a moment if this was some sort of rebellion, some sort of rage against fate on her part. But she tired of entertaining such thoughts, so she stopped wondering and did not think of it again for some time.

* * *

 

When she met him, her eyes were drawn to him immediately. Was there a special thrill that ran down her spine as their eyes met, something different in him than the other young men she picked out? Love as the movie-actresses described it always sounded like the feeling she felt when she laid eyes on someone and decided they’d be dinner, so she could never tell.

She watched him, never letting him know he was being watched. She’d stalked prey before, and she couldn’t say this was any different. At least, not until she introduced himself and she heard his name.

_Kaneki Ken._

It took a few moments to piece it together, to connect the sounds to characters she’d seen so long ago. Then, her eyes widened.

She’d forgotten all about it, and yet here it was. Fate. Destiny. Love. Her  _soulmate._ She actually faltered, her name slipping out of her lips.

He blushed, “Ri-Rize? That’s… oh.” He only seemed to get redder by the moment. “I… well then.”

She realized he had recognized her name from his own soulmark. Something inside her turned cold.

“We’ll have to meet sometime,” she said in her sweetest voice, “I may not have known you until now, but I feel like we have a lot of catching up to do.”

* * *

 

She didn’t know if she was against it. So she waited. Waited all the time before the date, and waited right through it, watching him all the while, studying.

His face flushed every time he looked at her.  He laughed at the strangest things. He read Takatsuki Sen, and seemed to perk up as they discussed the trick with the letter. He was quiet, withdrawn, but she saw light behind his eyes. It was exactly what had invited her to tear out his liver. Now he fixed them on her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking, pure adoration shining through them.

She wondered if that earnestness there meant he was supposed to fix her, supposed to take the parts of her that people like Banjou and her father scrunched their noses at and bandage them up until she was something else. She wondered if she would enjoy such a life, living the “right” way. Being “whole.”

They walked into an ally, right where she’d planned to kill him. She stopped, closing her eyes and tilting her head up.

“Rize?” he asked.

“Hm,” she said.

She thought. In the past, she’d found herself repeating the steps she’d taken to get to the sparring place she and her “father” had used, even though she’d disavowed him. It was a compulsion, something strong inside her that she had to actively stomp down because it was  _annoying._ She had expected love, her fate, to be something like that. A compulsion, only this time irresistible, closing her in like a spider winding silvery threads around a fly.

She felt no such compulsion now, no draw, no inexorable pull that threatened to stomp out her free will. There was no spark. There was no love. There was only her, and the same not-quite-feelings she’d had before.

How… disappointing, actually.

She took the moment to grab him by the front of his coat. He whimpered as she buried herself in his chest.

“Hey,” she asked, keeping the pretty voice she’d used on him before, “Can I see your soulmark?”

She could almost feel the heat radiate from his blush. “I-I,” he stumbled, “I… yes, if you like?”

She pulled apart the top of his coat a little too fast. His breath hitched, and there it was: a mark to match her old one, right on the flesh between his neck and shoulder.  _Her name_. She froze a minute, realizing he’d never told her where it was but somehow she knew anyway. She stared at it a moment, her breath ghosting over his skin.

She waited one more moment for the compulsion, for the feelings she was supposed to have and the sudden desire to live the way she was supposed to live.

Then suddenly she realized how much she hated the words “supposed to.” She gripped him.

“Kaneki,” she whispered, transfixed on those delicate characters, “What do you think of fate?”

“I…” he seemed lost, trembling under her grip. “I don’t know.”

She decided that was enough talk, and she bit. The scream rang pleasantly in her ears, and the taste—the warmth—the blood running down her mouth—it made her body light up with pleasure. She dug in deeper.

_not enough, not enough eat eat eat because you might never be able to again always eat eat more so delicious just have fun have fun it won’t last so enjoy it eat every ligament eat eat this may be the last I don’t need to be whole i don’t need love just this just this is enough so good so good so good_

She swallowed. The body under her went limp, and Rize breathed in a gusty laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> Ehhh I feel like this is wordy and pointless at times, and that I didn't quite communicate the message or theme. Oh well. Feel free to give me criticism! In fact, please leave a comment of any kind below. Or visit my tumblr at kammy-keets.tumblr.com, if you feel like it.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
